Winco just opened up here a few months ago but unfortunately it's on the other side of town, about a 20 minute drive. I had coupons for the buffet at the hotel next to Winco though, so we figured we would make a morning out of it. The four of us went out to breakfast, which ended up being free (coupons for dh and me and the kids we automatically free)and then we went to Winco and I was completely blown away by there prices. If it was closer to home I would do all my shopping there. Here are just a few things that I got:

.98- 12 pks. shasta cola
1.99-24 case of water
1.48- 2 lb. strawberries
.99- tortilla chips
.98-pineapples
.58-apples
3.98-20pk. coca-cola
.48-hot dogs
1.28-artichokes(never seen them this cheaper, ever)
.98-ground beef
3.98-3lb. bag boneless skinless chicken breast
3.98-1 lb. shrimp
2.48-1 lb. tilapia
2.49- 1 lb. roast beef lunch meat

I also stocked up on other things such as peanut butter, syrup,fresh veggies, butter, cereal, juice, eggs, ect. but can't remember the prices off the top of my head. Overall we spent $125.00, and since it wasn't in our budget this week, we had to take it out of what we had in our savings but I'm ok with that because A) we used it for something we needed instead of throwing it away at the casino, and B)we used cash instead of sticking it on the credit card. I should have plenty of groceries now to get me through the next two weeks. All I should need next week is milk, bread, and some pull-ups, so I'm going to try and put
fifty dollars from the next paycheck back into savings instead of buying more food.

Other than that, the only thing we spent money on this weekend was beer, margarita mix, and charcoal to bbq at home, but that came out of our weekly spending money.

Well we decided to refinance our SUV. We had a 16.49% interest rate and now we are able to get a 9.1% interest. We put $1000 down and we decided to keep our payments exactly the same but we knocked an entire year of payments off so instead of 4 years we now only have 3 years left now. We did take that money out of savings but I feel it was worth it since it's going to pay off debt.

I absolutely love the outlet mall that we have. It's about 45 m.in. From us but we go down there every few months to check it out. When we went this last time I stocked up on shirts and shorts for the boys at old navy and the childrens place and everything I bought was under $4. I found a bunch of cute tank tops at gap for myself that were a whopping $1.50 each. I buy all my pants at american eagle because it's the only place I can find them small enough that fit right. Usually their about forty dollars but I found a pair of jeans and a pair of capris on sale for $15. At bath and body works I only spent $20 but I got 3 air fresheners, 2 hand soaps, a lg. Vanilla candle, a perfume, and bubble bath. I love when I can get a good deal.

Now we are trying to save for vacation. Next month my SIL is bringing her kids to my in-laws in san diego and we are going to meet her there for a week and take the kids to the beach, lego land, and whatever else we can find. I am hoping to save $1000 between now and august 13 so we don't have to take any out of our savings. This Friday we'll be at $275.

Well it's been a few months since the last time I blogged and luckily hubby still has his job and I still have time. Last time I was on here I was talking about how they were doing layoffs where hubby worked but it seems that work has now picked up for the rest of the year.

We amended our tax return when we recieved more mortgage papers in the mail after we had done our taxes. It was a good thing we did because we got another $1800 back. We are now almost at the $14000 mark in our savings. It's making me itchy to spend money though. Last weekend we went to Macy's and bought the set of Emeril's stainless steel pots and pans. I really love them but they are really hard to keep clean. We did get a great deal though. Usually they are $279 but we got them for $175 plus a free cast iron skillet. I have also been buying extra groceries. In the past few weeks I've spent about an extra $120 on food outside of our normal budget but we have really needed to stock up for a while. I bought a lot of meat for the freezer and a ton of fresh fruit and veggies. I am one lucky mama because my kids will choose fresh fruit over sweets any day. My oldest just turned 3 in April and my youngest turned 1 last month. For both of their birthdays I couldn't get them to eat their cake, they only wanted the fresh strawberry's that were in the middle of the cake.

Our hot water heater busted last month and that cost $642 to replace. We then had our air conditioner serviced a few weeks ago and we were informed that it's about to die on us and may not last through the summer. We're lookin at about $6000 to replace it. Boy am I not excited about that. It's something we'll have to do though because it's already 105 degrees and it's only the beginning of June. On the bright side we are now under $13,000 on our car loan. We are hoping to pay it off by the end of next year.

We really want to take a vacation soon. I'm a little worried about hubby taking a week off from work. I still don't think things are secure enough for us not to worry about his job. I just hate telling hubby no we can't go when I know he really wants to. We want to go to the beach but I looked on hotels.com and wow the prices are really steep right now for a decent hotel. The only hotels that were even near $100 had less than a 2 star rating.

Well hopefully I can curb my desire to spend our money like crazy and I can get over that $14,000 mark and maybe get up to $15k. I wish hubby was more of a saver though. He never spends anythng without asking me but whenever I look at something and say I like it he's always telling to go ahead and get it, that I deserve it. As much as I love him for that it makes it that much harder for me to tell myself no and that much harder to tell him no when he asks if he can get something.

Hubby gets a new health plan starting Feb. 1st. We have two to decide from. The first one is an HMO and has no deductible or out-of-pocket-max. and costs $32/week, which is what we are paying now for his current health plan. The second is a HMO + PPO, where you can decide which to use, depending on what the doctor or hospital takes. The HMO side has no deductible or out-of-pocket-max. but the PPO side has a $2250 deductible and $18,000 out-of-pocket-max. It also cost $64/week, which is $32 more a week out of his paycheck, and that =$1664 more a year. Also, if we use the ppo side we still have to pay 20% of everything after we meet the deductible but the hmo covers everything. We have always had PPO and am not sure how hmo is. Does anyone have an hmo plan, and how do you like it? Would it be worth the extra money every week to get the option of having both? We are all very healthy and only plan to have routine check ups, but we do have two babies to think of.

Well it's been a few months since i've updated my page. My youngest is now 7 months and a whoppin 22 pds.! My how time flys.

December was pretty good to us. We put an extra $400 towards our best buy card and we were able to put $1200 in our savings, thanks to my hubby's xmas bonus. We didn't spend too much on christmas, just around $150. We bought our oldest a few toys and i got hubby some new shirts and a pair of jeans from j. crew, his favorite store. Luckily we have a big outlet mall here and all the clothes were 60% off. That store is way too expensive to shop full price. My wonderful parents sent two full boxes of presents for all of us. My son now thinks his nana is santa claus!

January hasn't been too bad. So far we have added $211 to our savings. Our goal for the year is to cut back on as much excess spending as possible and try to save save save! Usually work is pretty slow for hubby at this time of year since he's a heavy equipment operator, but he's been lucky and not only kept his 40 hrs. a week, but has put in 16 hrs. of overtime so far this month.

We're now waiting to do our taxes. We have hubby's w-2 and our mortgage statement, but I don't get mine 'til the 21st. I estimated on hr block and it said we should get a little ocer $2900 back, so I'm hoping it's pretty accurate.If so, we need to use $1000 to register our cars with the dmv and put new tires on one of the cars.

Our computer is starting to slow down and our washer and dryer are getting a little louder, so these are things that will need to be replaced within a year or two. We figure we will use them until they just about die because I'm not excited about dishin out the money for new ones. Our appliances will be paid off in November, so if we need to get new things we will put them on our best buy card with 18 months no interest. We have plenty in savings to pay for these things but it makes me feel much more comfortable making payments, since theres no interest. As long as we keep enough in savings to pay it off if need be, I don't feel bad about using the credit card although I know some people would disagree with me.

We've done much better on our eating out these past two months. We had been averaging $200 a month on eating out, but the past two months have been around $75. It's still not great, but much better. We have, however, been spending more on groceries. I used to try to stick to $100 the first week of the month, then $50 a week after that. We now spend $80 a week. I do include diapers and household stuff into this, and i guess with two kids we don't do too bad.

The only things we've done to the house is get a new computer desk and chair. We did get them on clearance at office max and spent $150 on a small dark wood desk and brown leather chair.

We are planning to take the kids to disneyland next spring. The kids will be 4 and 2, so they will be old enough to enjoy it. I know some of you have recently gone to disneyland and I'm wondering about how much it costs so I can try and save throughout this year so we'll be ready to go next year. I'm thinking about $1500-$2000? We'll probably go for about 3 days and we'll drive since we only live 5 hrs. away.

Well i think that about sums it up. Hopefully I won't wait so long to do another update.

We took our boys to get their pictures done on Friday. We were only going to go and do the $8 package so we would have pictures to send to family. Well they took such cute pictures that we wanted to get more than just one pose. We ended up getting a 20x24 mounted and framed wall collage, a cd with all the pictures plus the copyright so we can print pictures anywhere, and 12 full sheets, including 2 calenders and 2 collages, all for $330. They lady did give us a discount though. She took $100 off the wall mount, $30 off the cd, and then 25% off our whole order, and she didn't charge us the $80 for the collages. However, I still felt guilty spending that much money just on pictures, no matter how adorable.
We decided instead of buying family christmas presents, we would send them pictures instead. Both my family and his were fine with this and since we had budgeted $300 for presents, it pretty much equalled out.

Well while I was feeling guilty about spending so much money, I figured we get ourselves into these situations by keeping too much money in out checkings. I like to keep an extra $1000 or so in case something comes up, or they decide to cut hubbys hours all of a sudden but it seems like we tend to use it by eating out or buying clothes or something for the house. I decided to start only keeping $100 extra in checkings and then if something comes up put it on our emergency c.c. and pay it off at the beginning of the month with extra income for that month. Hubby agreed this was a good idea.

Earlier this year we bought all new stainless steel appliances at best buy with their 18 month no interest credit card. We have until next December to pay it off but we are hoping to pay it off sooner so we can start paying down our Suv because hubbys work car is about to give out and we don't want 2 car payments if we can help it. Well we took $500 from our checkings and put it towards our best buy card. This left us with $150 in checkings after paying for the pictures. I know we wont dig into our savings for misc. expenses but we will only if hubby's winter hours get cut and we need it to pay bills with. However, I think by puttin excess money to the credit card, we will be able to stop "wasting" money on things that aren't necessities. My in-laws are suppose to pay us back $100 of the $800 they borrowed from us on Wed. and I will put that to the c.c. too. Wish us luck sticking to this plan and not going back to our old ways!

We took the boys to our halloween festival this weekend. Our 2 1/2 yr.old had a blast. We took him last year and he refused to go on the rides. This year he couldn't get on them fast enough. He is obsessed with cars and thought it was so cool that they had car rides and he was able to go on them all by himself. However it was a bit pricier than we thought. We had to pay $3 each to get in, except for the baby. But then you had to buy tickets to go on the rides, which were $1 each but it took 3 tickets foe each ride. We were there for about an hour and spent close to $40. I can't imagine how expensive things will be once the little one is old enough to do stuff. They also had carnival games but they were $5 a game so we passed on those. The only good thing is that the proceeds went to autism and my son had so much fun that it was a good treat for him.

We also made our last payment to our student loan tis month which will free up $50 a month.

We did the fha streamline program this month and our interest rate went from 6% to 5.25% and we will save $115.00 a month.Right now we are putting all our extra money in the bank because my hubby is in construction and it always slows down this time of year. Last winter he went down to 35 hrs. a week for 4 whole months, from Dec. to march. When spring rolls around and we know hubbys hours will be stable again, then we will work hard to pay off our best buy c.c. before the interest rate goes up.

Well my hubbys work car needed some work done to it. We've known for a while but we thought we would just wear it out and then buy a new one at the end of the year. My hubby dreams of having a brand new truck. We have decided though that we don't really want another car payment since his car is paid off. We have decided to pay my suv off first and then in 3 or 4 years get a truck. As much as he wants one, he really hates having extra bills. So we took the car to the auto shop on Sat. and they put a new axle on, did an alignment, and one new tire. The total came to $411.08. We now need to go chane all the fluids, spark plugs, oil, and air filter which they said would be about $600. Since we've done a lot of extra spending and lending these past few months our checkings is about maxed out so we had to use our savings for the $411. luckily when i went to check our mail that day we had a $190 surplus check from our escrow account which i will put back in our savings. Next month we get an extra paycheck since it's a 5 wk. month. I will use $220 to put in our savings so we'll be back to where we were and then use the rest to pad our checkings again. We use our checkings for paying bills, entertainment, extras, and emergencies. My hubby will also get his quarterly profit sharing check and we will use that to finish the car repairs. Anyways, i am very glad hubby brought up the subject of holding on to his car so he won't feel like it's my fault he didn't get his truck. I would much rather spend $1000 on repairs than $15,000 on a new truck and worry about another bill.

I don't know if you guys get these but where I live we can buy these coupon books for $20 and you get 3 free oil changes but $10-$15 on most auto services plus $20 off if you spend over $100. Besides the $90 we saved on oil changes we also saved:$20 for spending $100, $15 off alignment, and then $15 off each fluid; trans., brakes, radiator, and power steering. So this $20 coupon book just saved us $185. Not bad!

So tomorrow we are leaving on our 9 day vacation to california to visit family. It will be the first time my hubby has taken a whole week off in four years so he is very excited for a much needed break. We've budgeted $1200 for this vacation and hopefully we can stick to it. We were going to use $2000 but with all these med bills we decided to cut it down a little and instead of taking it out of savings I just saved all of dh's overtime and bonus check. We are staying with my parents for most of the trip so we don't have to pay for lodging. We are going to spend a few days in Monterey so the little ones can see the ocean for the first time, but my parents are going with us and were generous enough to pay for our hotel room along with theirs. I figure we'll spend about $300 on gas as its an 8 hour drive from vegas to northern cali and then we'll need gas to get to monterey and back, and for any driving in town. Then about $100-$200 on entertainment.We want to take the kids on a boat ride in monterey plus we are giong to spend a day taking them to the zoo. Most of our budget will go to eating out. We have already made plans to eat out with my two sisters and their dh's one night and another we are going out with my best friend to meet her new fiance. Plus dh and i would like to go out alone one night and then the 3 days we are visiting monterey/ocean we will have to eat out and we would like to take my parents out to a nice dinner since they paid for our hotel room. I am going to take a notebook and keep track of our spending so we don't go crazy and go wayyy over budget without even realizing it! Anyways i am so excited to get out of town but must now spend the rest of the day cleaning and packing.

Last week I said I would try and not eat out at all until I went on vacation next month but I didn't make it. We went to my in-laws on Saturday, and my father-in-law got laid off about six months ago so their living off of unemployment, and they told us they didn't have much food in the house. So we went out and got food for all of us. However, that was the only time we ate out all weekend, which is much better than usual.

We did get hubby's quarterly bonus check on Friday which was $646.13. We used $100 towards getting our transmission flushed and an oil change and will use another $100 for our extra large electric bill and the rest will be added to our vacation.

I got another unexpected medical bill from when I was pregnant and the medical claim said we still owe $504.00. I am so glad we have a savings but all these bills are going to take a big bite out of it. We are thinking of cashing in my hubbys second week of vacation to help with some of the bills but were not sure if thats the best idea because it might be nice for him to have another week off later in the year.

On the bright side, when I talked to my mom, she told me she bought us a box of diapers and box of wipes from costco! That will get us through almost a whole month. Yay for mom!

I am going to try and not eat out at all from now until the end of the month. We tend to eat out quite a bit, at least twice a week. We used to be even worse and go out 4 to 5 times a week and we cut back to twice. If dinner isn't made when hubby gets home he always suggests ordering in or drive-thru and I usually agree if it means I don't have to cook. This means though that we usually spend a few hundred a month on eating out. I'm hoping to save as much money as I can though for our vacation in August because it would mean that much less I would have to take out o savings.

I'm a saver and my husband is a spender. Thankfully he realizes this and let's me stay in control of our money, otherwise we would be broke. He is very good about asking me before he makes any big purchases but he is always asking to buy something. It's hard to always say no to him, so sometimes I give in, even if it's something we don't really need. I wonder how much more we could save if my husband really got into saving money too?